SharePoint custom workflow Error – This view cannot be displayed because the number of lookup and workflow status columns exceeds the threshold”

While working with SharePoint custom coding on lists, I got an error saying that “This view cannot be displayed because the number of lookup and workflow status columns it contains exceeds the threshold..”

After googling in to the issue, I have found the solution in this post. We can see this problem due to lookup columns value exceeds the SharePoint environment configuration value. When tis error occurs, SharePoint web services will refuse to return the documents. By increasing “List View Lookup Threshold” value, we can fix this error.

We can increase the limit in SharePoint central Administration by using following steps,

Navigate to application Management in SharePoint Central Administration and click on “Manage Web Applications” link.

Select the web application to increase threshold value, Click on “Resource Throttling” in General Application Settings in the ribbon.

In List View Lookup Threshold” section we can specify the maximum number of lookup that Specify the maximum number of Lookup, Person/Group, or workflow status fields that a database query can involve at one time. Change the value to bigger and click on OK to save the settings.

SharePoint - Back to Basics – Resource throttling Settings

Resource throttling is configuration for performance of lists and resource contention. Resource throttling allows SharePoint Admins to manage the heavy data in SharePoint lists. From SharePoint lists supports millions of items, to control the data like number of items to retrieve at a time and number of items in a view we have Resource throttling configuration in SharePoint.

To configure resource throttling in SharePoint, Navigate to Manage web application SharePoint Central Administration. Select web application, in ribbon click on General settings drop down, select Resource throttling option.

In Resource throttling window,

List view Threshold value specifies the maximum number of items retrieved in one request. If the operation exceeds that value will be blocked. This limits the queries in the list, so that the performance will be increased. Default value is 5000.

Allow object model override, allows us to perform queries programmatically request the query use of higher List View threshold. This will be helpful in a using custom code and need to override list value threshold. Default value is “Yes”.

List View Threshold for auditors and administrators mentions the maximum number of items from DB query to process at one time when performed by auditor or administrator permissions. This will work in conjunction with “Allow Object Model Override”. By default this value is 20000.

List View Lookup Threshold value will specify the maximum number of join operations based on the lookup, Person/Group, workflow columns. Default value is 8. If Query uses more than 8 column values, operation will be blocked.

“Daily Time Window for Large Queries” allow us to specify run the large queries in day when usage is low. By specifying the time System will run the large queries with not enforcing the list throttling limits.

By using “List Unique Permissions Threshold” value, we can specify the minimum number of unique permissions that a list/library can have. By default it is 50000.

By selecting “On” for backward compatible Event handlers option SharePoint lists/libraries will supports for backward compatible events. By Turning on HTTP Request Monitoring And Throttling, a job will monitor performance of the front-end web server.